8
war hysteria’ during the Great War, and by the increases in pro-state and state led
political violence against left-wingers and pacifists with the start and end of that war.
8
This study is concerned with the rise in status group – racial or ethnic – violence
during and/or after the Great War. Stein points to the high incidence of collective racial
violence in America during or after the two World Wars and the Vietnam War as support
for his thesis that mobilization increases disunity.
9
(He omits that for the period 1915-
1919 the majority of American racial violence occurred after the war.) Warren Schaich’s
data suggest that 190 of 210 incidents of collective racial violence between 1900 and
1967 occurred during these three wars. Schaich argues that racial violence during and
after war is not due to economic competition between status groups, but rather because
war makes violence more acceptable and helps to turn latent group hatreds violent.
10
But
Schaich’s interpretation of the correlation between war and racial violence is challenged
by Michael Stohl’s quasi-experimental time series analyses of changes in internal
violence after the onset and the end of American wars in the twentieth century.
11
Stohl compiled a database of incidents of collective violence in the U.S. between
1890 and 1970, which following Weber’s tripartite categorization of power along the
lines of class, status, and party, he disaggregated into economic, social, and political
violence.
12
Ninety-five percent of social violence across this period was racial violence
(while the remainder was nativist). Stohl’s statistical comparisons of the rates of social
8
Michael Stohl, War and Domestic Political Violence: The American Capacity for Repression and
Reaction (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), 116, 100-102.
9
Stein (fn. 5), 44-5.
10
Warren Schaich, “A Relationship Between Collective Racial Violence and War,” Journal of Black
Studies 5 (June 1975).
11
Stohl (fn. 8), chap. 7.
12
Max Weber, ‘Class, Status, Party,’ in Economy and Society, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California
Press): 927-939; Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press,
1958), 180-193; Stohl (fn. 8), 52-58.
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